Comparison Between Tags on GitHub

Comparing between two versions using the GitHub compare tool

July 12, 2016

Listen to this blog post:
Your browser does not support the audio element.

Often I’ll want to see the difference between two releases on GitHub. Typically there is a CHANGELOG that will tell me a between versions but what if I want to see a diff between two versions that aren’t sequential? GitHub offers a way to do this.

I’ve been adding a link to the actual code diffs between versions in my LostGrid Changelist for each release and I haven’t seen many other examples of this.

Today I needed to see the diff between our current version or normalize.css and the latest version. Because we were behind a few versions it wasn’t as simple as looking at the CHANGELOG.md so I used the compare tool. It’s same place you would go to create a Pull Request but it also allows you to compare between tags. I find it easiest is to use the URL to perform the comparison.

So how?

https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/compare/<beginning-tag>…<ending-tag>

The key is that “…” and knowing the tags. I typically start at the release page and go from there. The GIF below explains it. 👍🏻

This is the URL that is being typed in within the GIF below.GIF of using the URL to see a diff between two tags.